How to Become the Author You Were Meant to Be

You have dreams of becoming a real “author.” But how do you get there?

Here’s how it usually goes.

You create a story and take it somewhere for feedback, maybe to a writer’s group, some writing friends, a contest that offers critiques, a workshop, or an editor. Your ultimate goal is to get feedback, but when you do, what do you focus on?

If you’re like most writers, you zero in on your weaknesses, or on what you feel you did wrong.

And that spells disaster for your writing career.

For an Author: Focusing On Your Writing Weaknesses is a Bad Idea

Most likely there were positive comments in that critique, but you probably forgot those rather quickly.

Sure, it felt good to read them, but within a few minutes you moved on and started thinking about where your story needed work.

This is how we’re supposed to do it. This is how we improve, we think. We fix problem areas and the story gets better and our chances of being published increase.

Except this rarely happens. Instead, you work for months, or maybe years, trying to fix what’s wrong with this one story, and odds are what you’ll have to show for it will be a slightly better story, but one that’s still not good enough to attract the eye of an agent or editor.

What happened? Your writing coach or group or editor or whoever it was had said your dialogue was weak, and you needed to speed up the pacing. You worked on both and afterward “they” said it was better. So why didn’t you get the result you were hoping for?

Making a weakness less of a weakness is not enough to make you competitive in today’s market. Competition is too fierce.

You have to create the best story you’re capable of creating, and trying to do that by focusing mostly on your weak areas is not going to get you where you want to be.

An Author Can’t Reach Their Highest Potential Focusing on Weaknesses

Thinking you can reach your highest potential by focusing on your weaknesses is like thinking you can make a horse a house pet if only you work hard enough at it.

Yes, it’s possible, but it’s a lot less likely than just getting a dog or cat instead.

I’m not saying you should ignore your weaknesses completely. When I first started writing novels, I hired an editor and got feedback that was really helpful. She pointed out my weaknesses, and I spent a good amount of time studying plot, story structure, conflict, and suspense.

It was time well spent as we all need to educate ourselves in the craft of writing.

The problem was that I spent more time on those things than I did building my strengths, which slowed my progress considerably.

An Author Often Has a Negative Bias

Even from an early age, we’re wired to pay more attention to bad news. Scientists have found that infants respond most powerfully to a mother’s negative or fearful facial or vocal cues, compared to her positive or neutral ones.

In one study, infants younger than six months focused longer on pictures of happy faces than fearful, angry, or neutral ones. They also responded more to happy voices than angry or sad ones.

But between the ages of seven and twelve months, that behavior changed. Infants were more likely to look longer at fearful rather than happy faces, and to respond more to angry and fearful voices.

There are a number of theories attempting to explain why this occurs. Whatever the reason, this negative bias continues as we age.

Research using brain scans on adults showed the brain had a greater surge in electrical activity when subjects were shown negative images than when they were shown positive ones.

That means we give more emotional weight to negative news, such as a rejection or bad review. We tend to elevate negative information far beyond the importance it deserves. That’s destructive not only to a writing career, but to life in general.

As an Author, Do You Focus Too Much on What’s Wrong?

Knowing this, let’s look at the advice most writers receive early on in their careers: attend a writers’ group, go to a writers’ workshop, and/or somehow submit your work for feedback. When you do this, you open yourself up to that one thing we all struggle with: criticism.

Much of the time, editorial critiques weigh heavily on the negative. Sure, a reader may indicate she liked one scene or related well to one character. But then she’ll be sure to point out all the scenes that confused her, the dialogue that didn’t seem to fit, the chapter where she got bored, and the setting details that seemed out of place.

You, the writer, are likely to come out of such an experience reeling with self-doubt and discouragement. It often takes a long time to recover unless you know how to counter it.

This is a double-edged sword since you can’t learn how to improve your writing if you don’t open yourself up to feedback. To avoid becoming roadkill on the path to publishing success, you must learn how to overcome negative bias and focus on your strengths more than your weaknesses.

Figuring Out Who You Are as an Author

Who are you as a writer? That’s a deceptively simple question and the answer may take you years to truly discover. That’s okay, as long as you start focusing on your strengths right now.

To begin, you first have to know where you’re going, and you can’t know that until you better understand your talents, skills, passions, and motivations. Start making note of those things that are working in your writing life.

If you find, for example, people respond to your blog posts about travel, you can build on that by writing more. If your last critique pointed out that your story was exciting and fast-moving, focus on that. Find out where that was working and how you can use that skill again in another fast-moving scene.

Focusing on your strengths doesn’t mean you ignore your weaknesses. Instead, it’s a strategy for discovering that unique niche that will help your writing stand out from the crowd—and draw readers to your platform.

What Happens When an Author Focuses on Their Strengths

When you focus on your strengths, the following happens:

• You’ll build confidence more easily.
• You’ll feel more energized and motivated.
• You’ll have more positive emotions about what you’re doing.
• You’ll feel less stress and anxiety, and happier in general.
• You’ll experience faster growth as a writer.
• You’ll be more likely to find what’s unique about you that you can then use to increase your visibility.
• You’ll be more satisfied with your writing career.

To get started, ask yourself the following questions, and write down the answers that come immediately to mind.

1. What are your three top strengths as a writer? (Examples include: realistic dialogue, great setting descriptions, well-drawn characters, and ability to create vivid mental pictures.)
2. What are your top three strengths as a storyteller? (Examples include: ability to write a fast-moving plot, create likeable characters, thrill or scare the reader, cause the reader to think, and evoke strong emotions.)

Once you have your answers down, keep your mind open. Allow feedback from editors, agents, readers, and contests to continue to shape your perception of your strengths.

Keep a file where you copy/paste all the good comments you receive, and notice any patterns that emerge.

In other words, make it your goal to determine where you excel as a writer, and once you figure that out, focus on those areas and do everything you can to make them better.

That’s the way you reach your full potential. That’s the way you become the writer you were meant to be.

Do you focus mainly on your strengths or weaknesses?

NOTE: This post contains some material reprinted from Writer Get Noticed! Get your free chapter or order your copy today.